Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @06:36PM
from the new-media-readers dept.

eldavojohn writes "Time Inc., News Corp., Conde Nast, Hearst Corp., and Meredith Corp. are teaming up to create a digital newsstand and somewhat open format that 'can render our content beautifully on those devices that come to market' instead of the gray inked Kindle's energy conscious display. Devices are being made for the new format with the launch coming next year. The format will also target smart phones and tablet computers. Will this pose a threat at all to the Kindle?"

In that same vein, I find it telling that they call it "our content". No, it isn't. It's either the creator's, or mine. They are just middle-men distributing data. This new venture, though, would perpetuate their hold on the distribution channel. At the same time, I find it also telling that they're focusing on display and prettyness, rather than battery-life and ease-of-use. It's probably going to suffer the same fate as DivX.... at least, I hope.

If the author gives them the distribution rights, it's still not their content. I understand that there's a difference between owning a book and owning content, but I find that a somewhat disturbing difference. No one ever creates anything in a vacuum. If ownership of ideas would actually be enforced, nothing new could be created. Hence I prefer to murky the waters in that area.

From the article, it sounds like they're talking about using the format for their news publications (or whatever the equivalent is for Fox):

"Content producers will also struggle to get people to pay for magazines and newspapers because many also offer free versions online."

That's absolutely their content. When you're a reporter and you file a story, the story belongs to the newspaper, magazine, whatever. It's in no way yours (although, as a reporter I was allowed to use clippings of my stories as writi

It's probably going to suffer the same fate as DivX.... at least, I hope.

DivX is an implementation of the MPEG 4 Part 2 ASP video codec (with some proprietary extensions). DIVX was a hated DVD based rental format which died a quick and well deserved death.

Anyway I think that people who buy into a proprietary format for media they wish to keep need their heads examined. Purchasing content for a device that is tied to one store or one manufacturer is incredibly short sighted. It doesn't really matter for

Purchasing content for a device that is tied to one store or one manufacturer is incredibly short sighted.

i do slightly agree with you, but you have to admit that the itunes/apple model has worked exceptionally well. And when i say "worked", i just mean that 90% of kids and 20-somethings use it and love it. I know there are some tradeoffs (you hear horror stories about people losing or rebuying everything), but you can't ignore their stranglehold on the market.(disclaimer: i use itunes because you almost have to with an iphone, but i do not purchase/use it for music)

Because, as an avid reader, I love my ebook reader, and it isn't even close to one of the current crop.

These "Five Top Publishers" are going to come up with a NEW device to rival the Kindle in such a core area as... what, newspaper subscriptions? That's sort of a "Yeah, you could probably do that too, why not offer it?" addition to the Kindle.

They also obviously have absolutely no idea why E-Ink is so popular over LCD screens (like their device will certainly be based on) - and it is not Kindle's E-ink display, by the way, you would think a newspaper publisher could get that right, but maybe that's indicative of why they are in decline? E-Ink is so popular even though it is incredibly more expensive because it is easy to read. Like the name implies, it is virtually the same as reading a book. You get a few more barely noticeable jaggies than straight print would give you, and none of the harshness or flicker of an LCD.

So what do they plan to do? Why, introduce harshness and flicker! And poor battery life, of course. Idiots. Now if they solved the technical hurdles to creating a color e-ink display that would be eniterly different, and their devices would indeed be beautiful. But I'm pretty sure they haven't done that.

Adding the media content and all that, well they'll just be selling a locked-down internet tablet at that point. Why would someone buy their locked down internet tablet when they could almost certainly get an unlocked tablet (basically a netbook) for less (probably)?

It really sounds to me like they don't have a clue what they are doing, and the only way it will work is if they only sell their content over these devices. If they do that, I give them a 50/50 chance of either going bankrupt or changing the way we view periodicals. Either way I still won't be buying them.

PDF is very poor for eBooks, because it doesn't have enough information regarding the significance of content on a page and the page size is hard-wired into the document, so for example PDF text doesn't reflow well if you change the font size on a reader, header and footer information get messed up, tabular information is a no-hoper on an eReader at anything but native page size and so on.

Since the whole case they make for the need for a new format and device is that eBook formats and devices like the Kindle, while good for books, aren't good for newspapers and other periodicals, because they don't precisely reproduce the print experience and layout, what is good for eBooks isn't really at issue.

Unless and until an e-newspaper-reader is literally the size of a printed newspaper, the point still stands.

What, they're going to "precisely reproduce the print experience and layout" on a device that, if they are lucky, is a quarter the size of a regular newspaper and lower resolution too? That's nuts. Either they are going to miserably fail at "precisely reproducing the print experience and layout", or the form factor is going to be different. Furthermore, users can have radically different preference

PDF is very poor for eBooks, because it doesn't have enough information regarding the significance of content on a page and the page size is hard-wired into the document, so for example PDF text doesn't reflow well if you change the font size on a reader, header and footer information get messed up, tabular information is a no-hoper on an eReader at anything but native page size and so on.

Rest assured that exactly this (full control over the presentation on the device) is what they want. And I even think that most consumers want this. Even books are not just data. PDF on a device with a nice large color display is just a natural fit. I don't know if I should like this, but this is *not* the Internet. This is a purely commercial thing fueled by publishers trying to make money from it. You can feel lucky if they leave out animated ads (and they'd be silly to leave them out).

Your RA is correct, but only discusses the case where a PDF is presented as part of a web-browsing experience. That's not the usual situation with eBooks. If I were to download Twilight to my eReader (in any format) my problem wouldn't be that it comes out as a linear block of text. The same is true of news articles -- just how much internal navigation is needed in a news article? And links to related articles isn't the answer, because eBooks are not web pages. I read eBooks in flight, where access to dynam

so for example PDF text doesn't reflow well if you change the font size on a reader

Actually, for some time it's been possible to use the Adobe tools to create a PDF designed to be reflowed [adobe.com]. (And I do mean some time.) Unfortunately, it doesn't happen automatically. Only the very shittiest PDFs won't reflow graciously in a recent Acrobat reader though (mostly crap eBook OCR)

HTML doesn't offer sufficient control over layout. Subsequent to HTML 1.0 a sequence of band-aids (like css) have been designed to address the problem, at the cost of more and more complexity. Often publishers just want to specify the layout, not open it up to complex negotiation with the client.

HTML doesn't offer sufficient control over layout. Subsequent to HTML 1.0 a sequence of band-aids (like css) have been designed to address the problem, at the cost of more and more complexity. Often publishers just want to specify the layout, not open it up to complex negotiation with the client.

Silly mistake you made there, IE[3-6] doesn't offer sufficient control over layout.

CSS was designed by people who never wrote web pages, either. If it had been designed by a web developer there would be a notion of the viewport and a simple way to align content. Floating boxes, 50% negative margins and javascript hacks don't count.

Even if you ignore IE (I've been doing that for years) it's still incredibly complex to precisely lay things out in the browser.

*Fixed* layout is not friendly to different clients, but precise layout is *necessary* for any non-trivial page.

You basically are saying "there is no problem, you're just doing it wrong" -- which is bullshit. Writing web sites that display smoothly across clients and devices is *fiendishly difficult* and it should not be that way. You would not get crappy web sites that look terrible on a cell phone if it weren't too hard to do it the "right way" and still make it look good on a normal screen. The cop-out a

While true, does contemporary print media actually do that much? Flipping through my local paper, I don't see much of value in the illustrations. A few graphs, a few photos of politicians, a few photos of sports games. The graphs and infographics could be rendered fine in black-and-white, anyway, at least if the paper's got a competent graphic designer.

It's woefully underused, probably at least partly due to the cost of printing in color for dailies. Maybe going digital will actually inspire them to do better, like the Boston Globe's wonderful Big Picture [boston.com] blog.

while true, newspapers only have a handful of color images for articles. The majority of it is for ads. magazines use lots of color, most of it in ads but there are more color images with the articles.

A nice illustration or well chosen photograph can add value to an article. It can set the tone or inform in a concise way.

And epub -- which is, under the hood, basically just XHTML + a specialized adaptation of CSS + a variety of image file formats, including both bitmap (e.g., PNG) and vector (e.g., SVG) which a reader must support -- already supports illustrations and photographs, and most dead-tree newspapers don't use much color, so neither a new format nor a device with features not found in typical eb

I think it has more to do with the wireless radio inside the thing. When wireless is turned on, it drains the battery faster than almost any other part of the device. So it's set to go to sleep when not in use. I think it's just an oversight that it still goes to sleep when wireless is turned off.

ePub, but I own a Kindle and haven't really noticed any lockin either. I'm a Sony employee and can get a great rate on a Sony reader, and I still bought the Kindle because the store + always-on internet service is just that much better.

They could add native PDF support in an update for us Gen 1 owners too, but haven't, so don't hold your breath:(

People thought they weren't going to add native PDF for the K2 either, and that happened with the new 2.3 release that just came out. I'm not saying it'll happen for the gen1, but people were thinking it wouldn't happen for the k2 either...

Of course. Publishers aren't stupid, they're already under Amazon's thumb, and they've seen what's happened to the music industry with Apple. It's no wonder they want to run their own digital distribution.

Yes, but obviously they are stupid because they haven't learned from all competitors to iTunes thus far. The only real competitor to iTunes in music is Amazon. Why? Because Amazon's music store is completely open.

These publishers could take out iTunes tomorrow. Become a central repository where anyone can publish works for free in a format that works on all platforms. No reason for consumers to use iTunes or Amazon. One of the main weaknesses in Amazon's store is that you can't give away works for free. Add that. Make it a central hub for all content and it will succeed. Make it a closed system full of arbitrary content like Hulu, and it will never amount to much.

What keeps me in the iTunes ecosystem is the podcast section where you get a centralized database of different media you can listen to for free. If one of these readers made an open format for reading blogs or other podcast equivalents in the literary world (serial novels?) so that I can download and read a ton of content I may just be persuaded to buy one. That's something a real, physical book cannot do economically.

Well, that's after they come down in price. Those things are expensive!

Granted, there's a small subscription fee, generally $1/month, but it's a start. Generally, I find the Google Reader + Smart Phone combination to be better for consuming blogs and other web content though. Web content just isn't usually authored with a black and white screen in mind.

The price, $300 for the Sony model I like, doesn't seem all that bad. The price of books in general for it seems high to me.

So far as serialized type content like blogs and web comics go I think it's entirely possible right now. I don't know that we really need to wait for anyone to create an open format for it. We just need a site that specializes in providing content from other sites reformatted to fit neatly into any of the already available open formats. The implementation could be iffy though as you'd

eInk (like the Kindle display) is definitely nice to read but a little color and maybe some sound would definitely help.

Kindle might be great for reading the occasional novel but it is worthless for any kind of textbook or reference material. Those just have too many pictures, charts, heck even syntax highlighting, and alternate fonts to be effectively used on the Kindle.

ePub may have potential as a standard but some of the current implementations are awful. They need to learn how to restrict the reflow (

eInk (like the Kindle display) is definitely nice to read but a little color and maybe some sound would definitely help.

They would have to get rid of the eink to do that, and reading on backlit LCDs sucks, as anybody who sits in front of a computer all day can tell you.

I can almost guarantee that this device will not compete with any traditional eInk readers. At best it will compete poorly with netbooks, but you seriously don't want to be reading a novel on one. Getting the news might be fine, but seriously, why not just get a netbook for news and youtube and whatever locked-down lame-ass equivalent they'll be putting in t

A device could have different settings, so you could turn on the color just when you want it.
That said... the same could be done for a netbook. So while they may be highlighting the "pretty pictures", the main reason is to have a dedicated device is, of course, content control.
-----
My husband is always trying to convince me that I, like him, am a geek. I keep telling him: yIDoghQo'

Regardless of how much they like color or what kind of DRM they want to bolt on, they're also going to want to actually sell their content. So they'll license the format to folks. And if Amazon is actually threatened at all by their devices or whatever... They'll do whatever it takes to license it.

Either that, or these companies will refuse to license the format... Which will quickly become irrelevant because it doesn't work on many devices... And they'll wind up abandoning it.

"None of that namby pamby green shit for us," shouted Rupert 'The Dominator' Murdoch. "Our reader will run on leaded gasoline fuel cells, arsenic paste and mercury vapor canisters!" When asked about the environmental impact of such a device, Murdoch ripped out the reporter's heart and ate it in a single bite.

"Argh!" said Murdoch, and brought the press conference to a close by pissing on the press corps and killing fifty puppies.

Even if this gets nicely marketed and gains a decent amount of traction into the current eBook user market, what will this do to make people want eBooks?

iPhone owners, of which there are SIGNIFICANTLY more of, can get their daily news much, much easier. Unless there are a sizable number of avid readers that would benefit from having these digital readers (which they wouldn't, considering the DRM and their anti-sharing nature), I don't think prettifying magazines and such for use with readers is a good solution. Furthermore, magazines are a bit touchy, since a LOT of them are sold right from the stands because of their convenience. I'm sure that a digital model would work better for subscription-based magazines like Time that would work well as a digital platform. However, I'd like to assert that what REALLY drives magazine sales are super catchy headlines and pictures relevant to our interests. There's a reason why tabloids and celebrity trash is incredibly popular with women...

As an alternative, I think that consumers would be better served with a coalition that really investigated the sociology, psychology and technology behind what people really want in digital book readers.

Here are a few examples showing why this is needed. Most readers come with keyboards, physical and/or virtual, but they are mostly useless. Additionally, the Nook comes with a color screen...but its introductory review only gave it fair marks. Even further, they come with cellular radios so that people can download books on the fly...but only work in the United States AND are still carrier-locked! Worse, with the exception of the Nook, they don't have Wifi...which is probably most convenient to readers in areas without wireless access or without the desire of paying umpteen dollars extra per month just to download books. Finally, let's not ignore the fact that they only have one screen, which is completely counterintuitive to the way people read books. One screen works fine for short text, like newspaper articles and such, but doesn't have the same ease of use when reading novels that are hundreds of pages long!

When the iPhone was released, it had a processor that was slower than a lot of its competition, bugs up the wazoo, and didn't even have copy and paste! Nonetheless, it sold like hotcakes on sale for the same reason the iPod did...it was easy for people to use, and it made sense to own one. When eReaders approach that level of ease, I think we'll see them really (REALLY) take off.

Care to back up your magazine claim with a reputable cite? I find it had to believe that magazines make more from news stands than subscriptions.

I have no recent data, only what I know some magazines used to say about the issue, and an anecdotal story. They used to say that subs were the main income, because stand sales got them only a fraction of the cover price.

And Utne Reader is my story. A "green" tree-hugger magazine at the very core, socially conscious, activist. They almost beg for forgiveness bec

Even if this gets nicely marketed and gains a decent amount of traction into the current eBook user market, what will this do to make people want eBooks?

Its not designed to make people want eBooks.

Its designed to provide an alternative existing ebook distributors to increase the share of sales revenue that the publishers of (dying) print periodicals can extract from sales of electronic editions, and to increase the advertising sales that can be realized by those same publishers. One of the big things they t

I'm not trying to be a nudge here, but I'm confused about the two screens thing....When you are reading a typical novel, you are probably reading one page at a time. So why exactly is only seeing one page at a time such an issue? You get the same view without all the awkward shape and pages flapping about. Granted, if your consuming pages quicker than the reader can refresh it might be an issue, but few people read that quickly, especially for pleasure.

Sort of.. lifetime access is rolled into the cost of the device(and probably a sliver of each paid d/l). But you would never call sprint(kindle) or Att(nook) for any reason whatsoever about the device. You can even crudely browse the web with the kindle with no additional charge. So there is no "lock", the data provider is black box to you, the ebook delivery is simply magic and really, its not a cell phone.
I was actually hoping the Kindle would be the start of the Wireless cartel becoming what they s

It's amazing how many people miss the point. When the Kindle and other e-readers come up in conversation, I explain time and time again exactly what e-ink is and what it means for battery life. And every single time the first thing that people ask is, "Oh, wait, so it's just in black and white?"

This is just a larger group of people missing the point of e-ink. Then again, since there are so many like-minded people, maybe they have a point of their own. Perhaps there is a market for flashy e-readers. I mean, netbooks are doing well enough.

I read two-three books a week on my DX and if I am not using the wireless much, it lasts me more than a week on a charge usually closer to 2 weeks. I also spend a lot of time talking to people about (Two flights a week almost every person I sit next to has a question) and many of them do indeed seem to pout about the color.

I have no desire to look at a backlit screen after spending the day with a computer. One day they will perfect color eInk, and then there really will be a revolution.

,P>
Actually, color e-ink displays would have to be illuminated from the front, just like b&w e-ink displays. It has to be because what shows on the back side of the display is exactly same as the front, except with colors inverted. Subtractively, the colors on opposite sides of the display will always amount to black (or something very close to it), and thus be opaque (or at best have truly abysmal contrast if you tried to shine light through it).

Games? Social Networking? The fact that Murdoch is a part of this venture does not surprise me, because it shows an astounding lack of understanding for why people are buying ebook readers and what the market actually wants in a book reader appliance. Namely, they failed to do prior art to find the millions of PDAs people were using to do exactly what this new format is proposing. Or rather... not doing exactly what this format is proposing, because no one really needs it and it is an energy hog.

The Kindle and other ebook readers (i.e. the Sony one I've owned for the past 3 years) did not become popular because they were a new idea and a new device, they became popular because of a new technology: e-ink. There were book readers before the e-ink displays came around, but very few people used them because they suffered from 2 major drawbacks. The first was the power consumption of their displays meant that you had to plug them in and let them charge on a daily or twice daily basis. People already have to charge their cell phones on a daily basis, but charging one twice a day when you use it a lot is pretty annoying, and a huge amount of power is spent on the display when a cell phone is being used. The second drawback is simply screen real estate and the interface to get to it. PDAs could do exactly what is being proposed, but they didn't because it was hard to use a handheld device in that manner. Sure handheld gaming devices exist and are used... but they have buttons and layouts specifically tailored to using the device as a game. The same goes for cell phones, PDAs, and ebook readers. You can play games on cell phones, but not easily and the power usage sucks up the battery. The new format proposal looks to do exactly the same thing to ebook readers. Congratulations, you just re-invented the N-Gage.

The major "killer app" in the ebook market that no one is mentioning is really quite simple. It isn't a killer display (black and white is fine for books), it isn't a fancy new display (though color would be nice, it would also be mostly useless and a major expense), and it isn't a whiz-bang new DRMed file format. What is missing from the ebook marketplace is simply a universal storefront. Amazon books only work with the kindle. Sony's store only works with their ebook readers. The same for most other ebook stores (with a wider list of readers that can use their store... but a lower percentage of people who actually have those readers). DRM has fractured the marketplace, but selling to the entire install base of ebook readers is really quite simple because all ebook readers out there can read non-DRMed files. It is only the stores that are enforcing DRM. The first store to offer a wide selection of books in non-DRMed format at reasonable prices will suddenly be able to sell to 100% of people interested in ebooks and steal market share from everyone else out there.

I could rant on this subject for days, but the bottom line is: I can get almost any book out there for free from pirates, and I don't have to worry about losing those books when I migrate from my Sony Reader to whatever device I might end up using next (the battery is finally dying). However, I've bought most of my books from the Baen store, because I can get them fast, easily, and with good proofreading. It is easier to read them and find them, and they aren't some OCRed crap with forced line breaks and errors. Publishers have to understand that on the web, they're not competing against the price and convenience other publishers, they're competing against some random pirate scanning in a copy of their book and giving it away for free. If it isn't easy to find a copy of their book that will work on my system for a reasonable price there ($15 for a paperback selling for $8 at the local bookstore?) there is no reason to give them money.

That said, there is one thing I can see some value in for the proposed format: daily deliverables. This is something that isn't done all that well in current generation ebook reade

There were book readers before the e-ink displays came around, but very few people used them because they suffered from 2 major drawbacks. The first was the power consumption of their displays meant that you had to plug them in and let them charge on a daily or twice daily basis. People already have to charge their cell phones on a daily basis, but charging one twice a day when you use it a lot is pretty annoying, and a huge amount of power is spent on the display when a cell phone is being used.

But e-ink isn't the only solution to that problem. Look at Pixel Qi [pixelqi.com] which are starting to produce *now* displays with 1/2 or less the power draw of an LCD screen and full color (with backlight, b/w without backlight) and video capabilities. Make sure to see the videos of an Acer netbook with such an display [blogspot.com]. IMHO e-ink will be very soon something nobody wants to have anymore (except in very special applications).

The very last page of the article consists solely of a link to a Sports Illustrated Tablet concept page. The tablet itself is the interesting part of this story. Whether or not the/. audience cares about Sports Illustrated or any other Time, Inc. property, we do care about gadgets, and I bet a great many of us would be perfectly willing to tolerate a year's subscription to SI if we could get that full color full motion video touch screen tablet for $150.

Yes, and they will be incredible alarm systems. You just set it to display your favorite Fox News story, and if any unwanted person breaks into your house and looks at your reader. It will set off the DRM. Sirens will go off and the police will show up in less than 2 minutes. Gotta protect those copyrights!

You'll laugh at those neighbors who don't use this great alarm system. After all, the police will only have a response time of 20 minutes or sometimes an hour, if at all. No one really cares if some los

They want to push some color, flashy, embedded video having, online capable version of a magazine? Hmmm.. I think I've seen that somewhere..oh, yeah, like a fucking website? WTF?
This already exists, its called the web and no, it will not "threaten" the kindle, whatever that means. The kindle is pretty good at one thing, books and the eInk is great for extended reading. Not text books or big picture books, but regular ol books, you know, the majority of books. If you want some type of hybrid

I used to work for a magazine distributor and have seen this coming for at least a few years. Now the distributor is out of business, but far before the time of a workable digital magazine download/viewing system. The big publishers are looking to cut their costs some more. They're raking in ridiculous profit, but always want more. Getting rid of actual physical product in stores would be a great way to do that!

The only thing stopping me from buying one of these E-ink readers is the fact they only render in shades of gray. Sure that's perfectly fine for reading a novel or even newspapers but if you are reading a book about photography for example, well unless the book is about B&W photography you are kind of missing out on the whole point...

mobipocket and topaz does color just fine. most Kindle ebooks are actually in color, you just see them in gray because that's the trade off of a display that is a power miser and also readable in a wide range of lighting environments. The device also supports PDF (poorly). And formats like ePub can display just about anything you can do in CSS/HTML4. not that Kindle supports ePub, but really this is more about format wars than price.

... and pay our fees, and publish only using our proprietary DRM that requires that our server still be up and running before you can read what you've paid for, but we'll shut that server down if we don't make enough money off this.

Kindle's bad enough on the "you can't buy this, only rent it, and we won't even promise you can read it once" business model. No, this isn't a threat to Kindle.